Turning the page

So today I finally made official my move away from Linux, through a post on the rosegarden-devel mailing list : I'm an ex-free software Linux developer, aiming to be a free software OS X developer. My only use of Linux is now on my home server (except at work where I still write Java on Linux). It's been 13 years since my first Slackware install, with kernel v1.2.8 back in 1995 on a 90MHz pentium with, at the time, 16Mb of RAM and 512Mb HD.

The first reply I got was a "me too" from an other user, who had made the same switch for the same reasons. He also mentionned that sound on OS X wasn't that rosy either : USB peripherals recognition problems, stability issues with Logic Audio... However these problems are on a higher level than those on Linux. Actually, I wish Linux had this kind of problems, but instead we have to deal with the most basic "can't hear anything" issues (or similar basic stuff like my mouse's tilt wheel being broken by a kernel update). And I'm just so f*cking tired of this.

Plus there's the fact that writing a music editor for an OS which already has the equivalent of alsa, jackd, qsynth and our own RG sequencer in it is somewhat more motivating than endlessly trying to debug random sound setup problems.

To tell the truth, even though I did gain a lot through these years, had I known that Linux would still be in such a state after all this time, I would have had jumped ship two or three years ago already, when OS X was starting to look welcoming enough. Core Audio might not have been as mature as it is now, though.